Watsom: time to get serious about the human genome

Christine Petersen ottilie at hotmail.com
Mon Apr 16 12:36:03 PDT 2001


James Watson came to give a talk at UC Berkeley several months ago, and there was almost a consensus of the people who attended that he is, (or perhaps always has been?) a complete lunatic. He doesn't just 'think outside of the box', but he leaps and prances around outside. I didn't go because I hadn't heard the announcement from the molecular biology department.

His lecture was on his ideas of genetic connections between human body size and color and psychological traits. He thinks that fat people are more happy, thus they are more likely to be lazy. Thin people are unhappy and thus they strive more and are more motivated. He also said that people with more skin melanin like to have sex more. He showed pictures of thin white unhappy looking women and happy fat people in order to back up the claim. This, of course, is impossible unless precisely the same gene is involved in the morphological trait and the behavioral trait, or precisely the same selective factor caused the two traits to evolve at the same time so that exactly the same groups have both. http://www.interweavers.com/berkeley/article.cfm?storyID=2141

I let my first year biology students in my lab section attend a research seminar in replacement of turning in one lab because I think a lot of freshmen and sophomores have never had the concept of 'research university' explained to them. They just applied to the UC system because it's prestigious or harder to get into, but no one ever showed them what professors here do with the other half of the time, in contrast to the setup at liberal arts colleges or state teaching universities. I was really worried that some student of mine might have accidentally stumbled into that and gotten the wrong idea about. what biology research is about. Christine _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com



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